I love the concept and usability of an ActiveModel::Errors paradigm. However, I and others often find it frustrating to work with the implementation.
I’d love to see a proper ActiveModel::Error object, where the errors attribute of a model including ActiveModel::Errors was an Enumerator of these objects.
There are various implied benefits and added flexibility that could be introduced in a backwards compatible way later, and immedate benefits. Would love to know what y’all think about this. Happy to implement if desired.
Immediate Benefits
The error type could be retained
APIs we build prefer to return Error objects to clients with the following schema:
{
attribute: "The model attribute to which the error applies. If blank, the error applies generically to the base model.",
type: "The type of error encountered with the model attribute or model."
messsage: "An internationalized message that can be displayed to a user.",
}
In particular, the type attribute allows clients to couple any logic they need on the error attribute and type, not themessage, which should be able to change with business/product needs.
With a proper ActiveModel::Error object, this is easily done. With the current enumerable design, this is not a clean extension to make.
